Simon Sansome, founder of Snowball pitched the company at the Santander X national finals, at the Santander HQ in Milton Keynes. Wowing judges Dame Jessica Ennis Hill, Tinie Tempah, Santander CEO Mike Regnier and last year’s winner Zeke Steer with his innovative app, Simon fought off 1,500 entrepreneurs that entered the competition.
The app allows users to rate and review venues for disability access. With tens of thousands of reviews integrated with Google Maps. Last month Simon Sansome Founder of Snowball was named in the top ten most influential people in the UK (Disability Power 100). Snowball also won the award for Digital and Tech category. The award also comes with £25,000 in funding and business support. Snowball also gets to represent the UK at the Santander Global Awards in Barcelona in February 2024.
Simon, a full-time wheelchair user came up with the idea after struggling to access his home city of Leicester. He launched a Facebook page (Snowball Community) which attracted millions of people a month and so he created the Snowball Community App. Recently Simon has appeared on the BBC and was featured on Steph’s Packed Lunch taking about the app. Simon told the Snowball Media Team ‘It’s been a really tough, gruelling competition over the past few months. There were some fantastic entries. Massive thank you to Santander X and staff for their support. After years of hard work, I can officially say that Snowball is officially a nationally multi award winning app, my wife Kate was with me at the awards and she was in buckets of tears full of pride, what this does now is give us the funds to train new staff and we’re looking to take on 20 new staff members in 2024’.
7 x Paralympic Gold Medallist Hannah Cockcroft and Tokyo Gold Medalist Aaron Phipps are Brand Ambassadors for Snowball Community which has over 100k followers on social media, tens of thousands of reviews, accessible toilets, changing places and blue badge car parking bays. If a place or business is not on the app users can add new places and leave reviews.
Snowball Community App can be downloaded on Apple and Android.